China’s Low Glass Ceiling Threatens Its Growth

How can it be that a company clever
enough to satisfy Apple Inc.’s famously stringent requirements
can’t figure out how to keep its workers from killing themselves
and hurting one another?

Last week’s riot at a Foxconn Technology Group factory in
northern China belies the myth that better pay and benefits are
enough to mollify Chinese workers. Foxconn, which is Apple’s
leading supplier, already pays above-market rates and has been
raising wages.

A sea change is rippling through many Chinese factories. A
workforce once dominated by women is now increasingly male.
China’s one-child policy chips away daily at its competitive
advantage in manufacturing for export, first by choking the
supply of labor of both sexes, then by restricting the flow of
women into factory jobs. The result is a more restive male
workforce, frustrated by crude management and a thick, low glass
ceiling.

When I first started visiting Chinese clothing and
electronics factories almost a decade ago, there were often more
women than men on the assembly line. The tide of migrant labor
pouring in from the countryside was so strong that Chinese
factory managers could be picky. Like the industrial bosses of
18th-century England, they chose women for their docility, their
dexterity and their attention to detail.

Today, many plants have no choice but to hire more men than
women. China’s gender ratio -- 107 boys born for every 100 girls
in 1980 -- has widened to 118 boys born for every 100 girls as
of 2010.

Male Malaise

Sex-selective abortion is creating kindergartens of boys
and villages of bachelors. In some areas, according to Dudley
Poston, a sociologist at Texas A&M University, 160 boys are born
for every 100 girls. (The natural gender balance at birth is 105
boys for every 100 girls.)

Chinese parents, wealthier today than a decade ago and
wiser about the risks of sending a teenage girl alone across the
country to work, are less inclined to steer their children into
factory jobs. I have met young Chinese women in countryside
towns -- where a decade ago most girls would have done at least
one turn in a coastal factory -- who say that “our generation
doesn’t work in factories.”

Nor are their parents as impressed by a prospective husband
for their daughter if he works in what many see as a dead-end
factory job. Professor Poston estimates that 40 million Chinese
men may never find a wife. Less-educated, lower-income men
struggle the most.

I have interviewed young male Chinese factory workers who
feel “shackled” to their work, trapped between their dream of a
good marriage and their jobs, where nepotism, not diligence or
talent, determines who becomes a foreman and who stays on the
line.

As cloistered in their factory dormitories as they may seem
from abroad, Chinese workers are wired to the wider world.
China’s manic economic growth and the opportunities it throws
off to the wealthy and well-connected are not lost on them.

Many Chinese workers I have met describe “personal
development” -- starting a business, learning a trade -- as a
goal. Yet few, if any, factories try to help them achieve that.
The truculence of the global supply chain is partly to blame,
wooing workers with high wages ahead of product launches and
expecting them to accept big pay cuts or long holidays when
production schedules ease.

Chinese factory managers are also part of the problem. Too
many treat staff as expendable, favor friends and neighbors from
home, and fail to offer workers a path for advancement.

Creating Opportunities

China’s male malaise has only just begun. Although the
gender imbalance appears to be easing, it is too late to arrest
China’s ballooning demographic debt. China’s working-age
population is peaking just as its elderly population begins to
soar. The lower birth rates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and
Singapore show that even if China canceled the one-child policy
today, economic development will persuade mainland Chinese to
keep their families small. Rising living and education costs
have led couples in these areas to postpone marriage and to have
fewer children.

In a country where the public-pension system covers less
than 10 percent of rural workers, according to a recent report
by the Asian Development Bank, the economic and psychological
burden on each young Chinese worker will only get heavier.

Companies buying from or running plants in China must start
seeing their local employees more like their staff in developed
countries. They should overhaul promotion practices by training
foremen to communicate more sensitively and assess employees
according to objective criteria. Foremen and other managers must
be evaluated on their ability to nurture and retain assembly-
line talent.

Factories must find ways to attract and keep female
employees, by promoting more women to managerial roles, offering
more generous maternity leave, and giving bonuses to managers
who persuade women to stay longer.

They should consider paying promising workers -- especially
those on the assembly line -- to go back to school. The best way
to help China’s young workers to be happier in their factory
jobs may be to show them how to leave. The prospect of
advancement and real skills that scholarships like this would
offer would help Chinese workers (and parents) to see a factory
job as part of a career.

Three decades into Japan’s economic boom, big manufacturers
such as Toyota Motor Corp. (7203) were spending months training new
hires. Singapore, realizing its skills shortage, made vocational
training a national priority. Japan and Singapore’s investments
in their labor forces helped raise incomes and lift their
economies into the higher rungs of the global supply chain.

In China, companies and the government aren’t doing enough
to help lower-income workers develop on the assembly line or get
promoted. Until officials in Beijing and companies such as
Foxconn understand this, Chinese workers are only going to get
more frustrated, threatening the nation’s economic development
and the social stability on which its new leaders will depend.

(Alexandra Harney, the author of “The China Price,” is an
international affairs fellow in Japan at the Council on Foreign
Relations. The opinions expressed are her own.)